All rather shocking

Week 11. Oh my god. That means I'm nearly a third of the way through this gestation, and given my blood pressure and the likelihood I'll pop some weeks early, more than a third the way through. What. The. Fuck.

Children have already made me aware that time operates differently. When I was herding Niece and Nephew around Europe, it got clear really fast the only way it was going to be nice was if I accepted Child-Time, and the fact that less gets done in more time when people are that age. At the same time the weeks with them whizzed by like a cheetah on meth.

And here we are - puking notwithstanding (I forgot to have a midnight snack last night so I was revisiting my misspent youth in the toilet again this morning), feeling like cancer notwithstanding (which I don't anymore), time has once more whizzed by and I'm for-realsies showing now. And soon - soon! - despite the worries, the preoccupations, the blood pressure - the odds are soon Ren won't just be a lovely little twitching white shadow on the ultrasound anymore, but will be a person who I'm holding in my arms. And soon after that, a person who's too big to hold in my arms. And soon after that, I'll be an old person who dies and leaves Ren without his or her mother. That's the optimistic projection, anyways. What a fucking world it is. I'm not complaining. It's just all rather shocking when you think about it.

On an only slightly lighter note. I have a lot more perspective in the BP issue now, BTW, since I got back in touch with Lexie's old mum, who is herself battling through the first trimester now. One of the reasons she had to give up Lexie was because she had a bit of a brain problem. Now she's got it all in control with medication. The problem, of course, is that the medication is contraindicated for pregnancy. Not just a little contraindicated, like the blood pressure medication I might have to go on if mine doesn't keep dropping, but quite contraindicated - like, won't-let-you-absorb-folate-and-it-is-quite-likely-there-will-be-problems contraindicated. However, if she starts having grand mal siezures again - well, that's not so hot either. Babies are well padded in there, I know, but having a grand mal siezure whilst driving or walking across something hard your head would make a jolly smash on - that's really not the way one would want to get through a pregnancy, to say the least.

I'm not facing any dilemnas or choices like that - my BP is too low right at the moment for me to need drugs, and since I'm almost out of the first trimester Ren's almost out of range for when BP medication has been suggested to occasionally cause problems. As generally futile as it is to make comparisons between people's problems, I understand - and draw some selfish comfort from - the fact that whatever choices I have to make about this matter are just not in the same league as the choices Lexie's old mum is going to have to make, or the choices women with chronic hypertension they've been on drugs for a long time for have to make, or the choices diabetic women have to make, or . . . well, most things, really. Perspective, Jessica, you fool. 

Carbe diem orbos

So the downside of the F-word being gainfully employed is that he can't come to India with me in December. Shit. It would have been so much funner with him. Oh well, I guess theoretically it will be a work trip anyways, and I should concentrate on working, confining my fun and shopping and exploring to the weekend.

I have a sense, though, of urgently having to carpe diem, and go to these weird new places now before we have babies, when we won't have the energy, money, or nerves to haul kiddies around the world too much, or at least not to places we haven't been to before and don't know the ropes of.  My experience of Asia remains confined to Shanghai and Singapore; I have a feeling that's like trying to get a sense of Europe through Newcastle and London (ergo est just not on).

How long do I have, I wonder. We just thought through the schedual for next year's magazine - there are four downtime weeks. I chose one in June so I could go to Europe to see the grandmother, if she's still alive. I didn't say I sort of hope I'm already in my third tremester by then. I didn't say it in part because I don't know if I am sure I sort of hope that. Life is so lovely right now without any kids in it. I wish our fucking birth control methods would just spontaneously fuck up and take the decision out of my hands. I don't have the mental equipment for it.

And I don't even nearly have the confidence to make it - to say, okay, now I'm going to start trying to do this to some poor, unsuspecting unborn spirit floating around in the ether waiting for its next crack at karma and the eventual escape from the cycle of existence. I don't want to be looking at my kid in ten, twenty, thirty years and be thinking, sorry, kid, you didn't deserve me; you should have been born to someone who wasn't a monumentally selfish lightfoot with a pottymouth and zero housekeeping skills. You deserved someone less opinionated, less mentally unstable, less misanthropic, less Dread Pirate Jessica, in short.

By the same token, in ten, twenty, thirty years, I'm even more petrified at the prospect of all of the things my children could have been but weren't because I didn't have them, and maybe they were born to some fat suburban reality-television watching cockwanks who didn't even read to them or take them anywhere nice for their holidays instead, and they're fucking miserable and spending all of their unconscious energy wishing they'd had a family like us. 

I'm also petrified of dying while they're still in their formative years. Sometimes inconveniently, I actually am religious in a recognizably Christian sense, and the idea of still having some sort of recognizably conscious existence and having to impotently watch the world fuck my child up after I'm dead just makes me want to vomit all over my computer. Holy fuck.

What a fucking world, man.

Please relax that asshole, ma'am

Had an actual sleepless night last night. I think it's been years since I had one of those that wasn't on purpose. It's from spending so much time with my mother, of course, more than I have in years. Lord love the woman, because I certainly do,  because she's a jewel among woman, but she worries, and it's infectious.

And of all the people in the world who don't have much to worry about, I must be in the upper hundred thousands. Her too. I mean, holy shit. I could stop working right now, as could my brothers, and she and the father already have, and we'd still know where our meals were coming from for a good forty years. But there you are. We both have depressive personalities, like her awful mother before her (her awful mother, by the way, has just turned a fairly spry 99; never overestimate the power of positive thinking), and when you're a depressive, you can be morbid about it or you can be an asshole about it or you can fucking worry.

Usually I choose the asshole method, especially since that course of psychoanalysis a few years back, before which I tended toward the morbid, which is just a variant of the asshole method. I'm my awful grandmother's awful grand-daughter, after all, and the asshole method is way, way better for the depressive than the worrying method. There's just too much guilt, stress, and - well - worry involved in the worrying method. But the worrying is really infectious. When someone else worries that much, one starts to wonder - well, why aren't I worrying too? Is this hubris? Are the gods about to strike me down? Well, shit.

And then one gets down to worrying.

For this sort of reason, I think the asshole method - as long as the asshole understands they're an asshole and tries not to go apeshit with it - is actually preferable to the worrying method for the people around the depressive. I'd rather be stuck on a desert island with another asshole than a worrier. At least you can have fun playing with assholes. Yeah, I said it. God, I miss my old man. Just another week or so.

Merci, ma petite belle

Years ago, a young Miss La Spliffe did the present-day Mistress La Spliffe a huge favour when she saw the F-word on a bus, listened to his Australian twang pleasantly modified by the need to communicate with non-native speakers of English, and decided that she was going to have that. I find I am able to look back on the past me's and be quite judgemental in a negative way about their actions, or, as taught by my Jungian therapist, to comfort them over their various injuries, but it's not nearly often enough that I look back on my past me's and thank them for what they've done.

Maybe I fear that's tempting fate - maybe it's the death-worshipping, fatalist Catholic in me that makes it so easy to condemn or pity my past selves, but makes it usually just outside the realm of possibility that I'd be grateful to one of my past selves for the awesome thing that they did that's made my life so much more awesome. Or maybe - rather more likely - when I look back at the mistakes I made in the past, or humiliations I suffered, I don't want to own them, and so fall back on the Jungian idea that that was another self who went through them, and when I look back on the awesome things I did in the past, it feels like ME - the ever-present, ever-conscious I - who did them and is willing to take full responsibility for them! Any non-abstract thought is some sort of cop-out, I often think.

Anyhoo. Whatever is the case, 20-year-old Miss La Spliffe has done freshly 32-year-old Mistress La Spliffe a massive fucking favour in her choice of the man she had to have. I've been very aware of that for some time in terms of romance and companionship and all that. Now I'm aware of that in terms of the fact that the demands of Miss La Spliffe's voracious poon has led Mistress La Spliffe to Australia via the medium of the lovely Australian man, where a bunch of people who were strangers to me less than three weeks ago gave me a lovely birthday and where everybody has just been so goddamn sweet and so unannoying.

I'll be your knight in shining armour, riding to your relocative rescue

I wonder if other women's fantasies tend to be wrapped up in someone coming (heh) and taking them away from all this. In fact, I wonder if some women fantasize about men coming (heh) and taking them away from all this, or otherwise solving their problems, as the fantastical moneyshot, rather than sexual congress. The question is on my mind because I am fantasizing about being taken away from all this like crazy right now.

Charles Bronson chucking me over the saddle and riding away from this fucking apartment over the steppes. Lord Peter Wimsey sending in Bunter to take care of business while we go get fed and sloshed at Brussels' finest restaurants and then steal policemen's hats. Magnum PI evacuating the building charmingly while Nick Cave sets it on fire; watching the glow of all my burdnesome possessions and contracts conflagrating in the rear-view mirror while we drive off squeezed into the Ferrari. This one stinking hot South Asian CEO I deal with buying Belgium and making me the queen so that I can formally instruct everybody to get fucked. Jake Gyllenhaal showing up at my door and cleaning up this fucking pigsty, barking angrily in American-accented French down the phone at all the institutional pains in my ass while I smoke a joint on the sofa and just watch. Holy fuck, that would be so awesome.

I mean, I can hardly express how fucking hot these fantasies are for me at the moment, and yet how asexual they are (though obviously it's not the stick-shift I'm sitting on when we're all squeezed into the Ferrari. I'm not made of stone).

In fact, in form if not in specifics, I'm fantasizing about men the way the television, from memory, does. Not as irresistably competent sex-gods, but as fixers. And that begs the question: is this how a lot women actually fantasize? I know I don't usually lead a frightfully stressful life; I don't have to worry about money, I don't usually even have to worry about cooking and cleaning - but right now with the move and with the F-word having fucked off to Rome I am fucking stressed in a way that I suspect most adult women, especially those juggling children and work and incompetent partners, are pretty much all the time.

And it doesn't take fucking Jung to work out that may be why the idea of the Prince of Persia bursting into my apartment, embracing me passionately, and then grabbing a mop instead of my titties, etc, is really awesome. And maybe that's why television hero-men have so few boners and so much general competence. It's a strange thought, and I don't know whether it's frightening or not. I think I would have thought it was frightening before I started having these fantasies myself, because they're - well, I'm not sure why, actually. It's not as though many sexual fantasies are any less unrealistic and potentially damaging in terms of expectations for most Real Life men than knight-in-shining-armour fantasies; in fact I suspect a decent quantity of men would prefer to fail or be replaced as fixers than as congressional partners. I guess it's frightening because I really don't like the idea of television getting me, because I'm a snob.

Anyways, I'm getting enormous comfort out of these fantasies at the moment, so that's something; and I'm reaching a point today - even if I'm procrastinating with a big old weekend blog - where there will not be anything else to be done by the end of the day until other people (not knights in shining armor, sadly; none of those on these fucking rainy Belgian horizons) start playing their roles. And I guess the lesson in all this is that men should make sure women are less stressed so that women have more time to think about sex, and that way we'll all get laid more, and in more creative and exciting ways.

Psychoresolution

I've decided 2010 is going to be insofar as possible a mental health spa of a year. Go to the weekly meetings, start analysis again, try to sleep more, save getting really high for occasions a bit more special than having had a hard day at work - they're all going to be hard days at work until work stops - basically try to get myself a little better-regulated. 2009 was a bit of a tough year in mental health terms with work diving into an even greater cross to bear than I had been expecting, and I'd been expecting things to get quite cross.

Of course it was my boss disappearing, making things about twice as difficult in practical terms, and horribly different in emotional terms - coming in every day and sitting in my desk next to his empty desk, his Chupa Chups and slippers and fucking Ribena waiting for him - just waiting. HR Goddess was going to clean it out until being told his mum is coming to the city soon to deal with his apartment; she thinks his mum may want to see it - even clean it out herself - none of us know how these things need to be dealt with emotionally. How could we? Luckily this is a horrid, freak occurrence that really doesn't happen often enough to make it into any manuals.

You know, I'm quite sure he's dead but once in a while that's still tempered by not believing that this is happening.

They're going to replace him soon and I suppose I'll believe it then - although soon, in these terms, is not likely to be soon, since they need someone with quite a lot and a specific sort of experience, and the woman who's doing the choosing was an extremely good friend of my boss who worked closely with him for years and years, and will need to work closely with this next one for years and years, so she won't be too easy to please. I just hope to god that they rearrange the office when it happens. My whole 'not believing this is happening' shtick is aggravated by occasionally having a question about what I'm doing and looking up to ask him and realizing no - he's still not there. I think I'm going to lose it a bit if I look up to ask him a question and there's someone else there instead.

Anyways, so things continue dreadful but the thing is, that's life - and a lot of horrible things will happen, and a lot of lovely things will happen, and I want my brain to be capable of dealing with both categories with more or less grace.

Shit too heavy

I've started having nightmares about my missing boss, who I see standing with his back to me, and who won't turn around even though I yell at him until I wake myself up. So I'm restarting analysis. Any excuse, apparently.

Just when you thought that a navel couldn't get any more gazed . . . Luckily this is Belgium, so there will probably be a certain degree of ridiculousness involved in even getting an appointment.

Gah.